For example, Parker says, the software helped determine the factors that drive the local population's attitudes towards wildlife. "We used SPSS to predict what influences people's attitudes, whether that was education level, people's age, what their tribal background is, whether they'd had contact with conservation before, whether they got benefits from wildlife - a whole range of different things," he says.

Looking forward, Parker says the organization plans to continue working with IBM to further analyze the data collected. "We'd like to overlay remote sensing data, radio tracking data and aerial survey data, and combine all our information - so we'll be looking to team with IBM to work out how to... feed all these different types of information into our analysis," he says.

Connecting Zebras With the Corporate World

IBM program director Marcus Hearne says there are several parallels between Marwell Wildlife's study and the corporate world. "The result of predictive analytics is being able to best apply the limited resources you have," he says. "So northern Kenya can be seen as a market itself, and within that market you have very particular segments hidden away, just like you do a zebra population."

Predictive analytics can be used to help apply limited resources as effectively as possible in any target market. "In the case of Dr. Parker and his organizations, it's conservation activists and wildlife specialist veterinarians... and in the case of a business, it's marketing resources, it's salespeople, it's budgets for travel, anything like that," Hearne says.

IBM's predictive analytics software can be also used to help survey any market, either of human customers or of zebras. "If you think of all the wildlife in north Kenya like all your potential customers, and the zebras are the ones with the best lifetime value to you, you would be applying some of the same principles to map them out and find them without having to interview every single customer," Hearne says.